Many patients need organ transplants but are unable to obtain suitable organs. One of the primary reasons is that organs that are otherwise viable when harvested from a donor are not preserved for long enough periods of time to allow them to be transported to appropriate recipients. With current preservation techniques, transplantable organs remain viable for about three to four hours and, beyond that time, suffer ischemia and tissue injury, which renders them unviable for transplant.
Current preservation techniques include cryopreservative methods, which involve the cooling of the transplantable organ to temperatures well below physiological temperatures (e.g., below 25° C.). Such techniques typically use preservation solutions that do not replenish energy sources within the organ during transplant or maintain the organ in a functioning state and therefore are largely ineffective in preventing ischemia and other injuries to the organ. The solutions also often rely on the use of high molecular weight impermeants to maintain the organ at these temperatures prior to transplantation, and such components are in many cases harmful to the organ.
Although improvements to solutions have been made over the last several years, particularly as disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,100,082, 6,046,046, and PCT application PCT/US98/19912, further improvements are still needed.